The word “manuscript” evolved from the Latin manu scriptus, meaning “written by hand.” I’m reading a book about various people who have been involved with manuscripts, including monks, forgers, and collectors, and it’s a lovely read.

At the same time, some friends sent me a copy they had of a book about lettering. It’s a beautiful old book, paperback and yellowed but with marvelous models of how to write. I love books like that.

And my adult kid gave me a facsimile of Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, an illuminated manuscript. I can’t read the Latin, but I love the writing.

Nearly sixty years ago, when I was 15, I took a summer course and learned how to touch-type, on a large manual typewriter with a smooth action, loud keystrokes, a little bell that sounded when I neared the right margin, and a shiny lever that allowed me to return the carriage to the left margin with a thunk once I had completed a line of text. My parents bought me a little portable typewriter for college, though it wasn’t nearly as glorious.

Knowing how to type got me my first couple of jobs. Those first couple of jobs got me other jobs where I also had to type.

Meanwhile, fifty years ago, after I had taught myself to write legible cursive, I taught myself (with a book like the one I got in the mail the other day) to write in Italic, Gothic, and a number of other hands, and made a little money as a calligrapher. People wanted place cards and invitations, mostly, not illuminated manuscripts, and they didn’t pay enough to make it worth my while, so I kept calligraphy as an occasional sideline.

Around the same time that I taught myself calligraphy, I took a course in Gregg Shorthand. That also came in handy sometimes, though by that time most of the people I typed for preferred to use a Dictaphone. So I mastered the use of a transcribing machine, which was a foot-pedal operated tape cassette player. I sat touch-typing and listening to the same syllables over and over until I got the language down.

Later, after I realized I would get terminally bored if I was a secretary all my life, I went to graduate school. By then I had my own computer. When it came time to do my doctoral research, I bought my own transcribing machine, because I was interviewing subjects on tape. I also used my Gregg shorthand, because in my kind of research, I was writing down everything I saw and heard on site, at a great rate.

I ended up with one hell of a lot of WordPerfect documents on my computer, as a result. To analyze my data, I did searches for keywords in my documents, and extracted excerpts from my field notes where I observed or heard something related to those keywords. I had binders full of those excerpts, one for each category.

I did my review of literature by hand, though, using index cards, because it was easier to sort index cards into piles by topic on the floor than to try to organize them that way in a document. I wrote in cursive on those index cards. In black ink. With a fountain pen.

Somewhere during the period, I was also writing a novel. I wrote it partly by hand and partly on my computer, and printed it out on my dot-matrix printer. God those printers sounded horrid, yammering and keening. I submitted it at one point, but the publisher I sent it to was going through difficult times and after a year, I requested it back and put the document in a drawer.

I defended the dissertation with distinction, got my Ph.D., and started being a classroom teacher, writing on my students’ papers (in print because my students had a hard time reading script). In the meantime, I was keeping a handwritten journal. I mastered the art of writing on a blackboard, and then mastered the art of writing on a whiteboard. I still prefer using a whiteboard, even though sometimes that meant writing the same things over and over again, four times a day. I can write backwards, behind my back, and upside down (I can read upside down too, a very important skill for a teacher).

At one point, my husband taught himself to use a computer, and one day when he was swapping out my hard drive for me he deleted all my doctoral fieldwork computer files. I wept for two days. All that shorthand, all that transcription, all those index cards and binders, all had disappeared into the void, because I didn’t have the binders any more. I did, however, have two hard copies of my dissertation, and there was one in the university library. Also, I didn’t care. And I had a perfectly useless doctorate.

I published the novel, and a sequel. I was dealing with family problems. My publisher didn’t offer me another contract. My agent died.

My school tried to make me use a SmartBoard because it was the coming thing; I mostly ignored it, because I found the whiteboard and those juicy markers so much more versatile. But meanwhile, I started using Google Docs with my students, because they allowed me to be much more involved with their writing process. There were times when I would log on at ten at night, see that a young student was desperately trying to write something, and type in his document, in a different color, “Go to bed. It’s too late.” I learned to use Moodle, Blackboard, and Canvas, one after another, because they were the coming thing.

Meanwhile, I made my students write and write. I even tried refreshing their cursive for a couple of years, but they resisted. I noticed that most of them couldn’t touch-type, either.

Then I wrote a couple more novels, and self-published them, getting the rights back to my first two so I could put them online.

In St. Anselm’s time, monasteries lent each other copies of manuscripts so they could be copied. That was how you got your books. You’d write to St. Anselm at Bec and say, “Can I borrow your copy?” and St. Anselm would say, “Sure!” and send a young monk on horseback with the book so one of your own copyists could do the job. He had a lot of classics available for copying, and he wrote some of them himself.

Of course, at least once, the young monk and his horse would fall through a hole in London Bridge into the Thames, true story. The book didn’t get wet, though. It survived. A lot of those books have disappeared now, after all, despite the efforts of Anselm and all his fellow custodians of words.

Now we have large language models to do the laborious work of copying and disseminating knowledge. However, a lot more errors seem to creep into the LLM versions, plus they don’t give credit to the original writers. My books have been used to feed LLMs, I found out recently.

They’re fine for some things, though. My doctor, who has only 15 minutes to talk to me when I make an appointment because the practice of medicine is distorted beyond recognition these days, hauled out his little device and said, “Is it all right if I use this to take the notes?”

“Sure, I’ll check it afterwards to see–“

“If it hallucinates? Good enough,” he said, turned it on, and put it down. He looked tired. It didn’t hallucinate.

When King William made St. Anselm Archbishop of Canterbury, they had to carry him, crying, into the church to take up his appointment, against his will. Writing is its own reward, and he was a writer. He knew, if he became Archbishop, he wouldn’t have time to write. I know how he felt. I still write by hand, in fountain pen, in my journal, every day, and every day, I flutter my fingers on the keyboard, watching words appear on the screen, as if I had willed them into existence. It’s all manu scriptus.